When I was a little girl, I’d sit on Lol’s lap every night before bed and ask the same question, “Mommy, was I a good girl today?” If I’d been well-behaved, she would say yes. On days when I was naughty (like the time I purposely dropped an encyclopedia on Teara’s head from the 2nd floor of our house), she’d look at me sideways and ask, “What do you think?” I’d say, “Noooo ☹️” and then we’d discuss how tomorrow would be better, and I’d go to bed with a clear conscience. It was like confession, but on my toy chest instead of inside a booth.

It’s what guided me through most of my life. If all was good with Lol, then all was good with me.

Now that I’m older and married, her opinion still matters greatly to me, but so does PJ’s. So when all is right with Lol & PJ, all is right with me. He’s been inside my mental confession booth since around 2002. It’s starting to get a little crowded in here.

When I read back my last blog, it was a lot – even for me. I’d also gotten some private messages that had me thinking, but didn’t really sway my opinion enough to do anything about it.

My main point of concern was that for the sake of “my art”, I wrote out the N word when describing what I thought a fake tough guy would say.

By writing “N word” when it was supposed to be me saying it, the reader was supposed to understand what I was doing and my thought process was that it would have been condescending to do it differently.

I wrote about other controversial things that should probably be saved for a different time – maybe when I’m on Stephen King’s level and can write whatever I damn well please 😁 Maybe not right now when I have a jobby-job that might not agree with my bloggy-blog 🤔 🤐

So I asked PJ if he read my blog and he said yes. First question: Did anyone say anything about you writing the N word? I blurted out the justification mentioned above.

He had to get back to work, so I think he fake-appeased me so I wouldn’t go on and on for an hour.

So I called my biff and told her the story. She pretty much accepts me 100% for who I am, even though she knows I’m pro-choice and thinks I’m a liberal (even though I don’t consider myself a liberal), and she is a pro-life, Catholic, Republican (but like, a loving pro-lifer who means pro-life for a person’s entire life and not just pro-womb and then doesn’t give a shit about grown people and just takes that stance to support her political agenda; which btw, she also knows Trump sucks.) She’s like my real-deal Catholic confession booth.

Anyway, after telling Biff the whole story about my blog, she said, “I don’t think you need to worry about it. People will understand what you’re doing. The only ones who will have a problem with it are the ones who actually say it themselves. It’s like if you were Quentin Tarantino and he was writing dialogue and he wanted it to really sound like the person who was supposed to be saying it.”

It’s worth mentioning that the way to my heart is comparing anything I do to the master, QT, so I left the blog up.

Later my parents came over for our outdoor, social-distanced, Thursday night drinky-poos. We didn’t discuss the blog at all, but it was weighing on me. I don’t know if it was the alcohol or my conscience, but it was weighing on me. And weighing. And weighing.

I felt that heaviness in my stomach that I couldn’t shake even after they left. Later, reading it back again, I turned to PJ and said, “I think I’m going to take down my blog post. It’s making me feel uneasy.” He gave a quick, “Ok.”

We were watching Homeland and it could have been that, again, he just didn’t feel like hearing me go on and on, but I think he was relieved that I was taking it down. So I did, and I instantly felt better.

However, I did feel the need to write about this ordeal that went on within me because it seems that I have unhealthy, co-dependent relationships with my mom, PJ, Biff, and now all of you 👍

Maybe one day … one day, I’ll be one of those people that say they don’t care what others think, and actually mean it.

If I offended anyone with that particular blog post – which happened to be my 100th and the first one I ever felt weird about – I am truly sorry.